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'Colonies in a Globalizing Economy 1815-1948' Working Paper No. 08/04 Colonies in a Globalizing Economy 1815-1948 Patrick Karl O’Brien © Patrick O’Brien Department of Economic History London School of Economics December 2004 This paper was presented at the second GEHN Conference, Irvine, California (15-17th January, 2004) funded by a Leverhulme Trust Grant: “A Millennium of Material Progress” For more information about the participants and activities of GEHN, go to http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economichistory/gehn/gehn.htm Department of Economic History London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7860 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7955 7730 Colonies in a Globalizing Economy 1815-1948 Patrick Karl O’Brien 1. International Trade for Colonial and Autonomous Regional Economies of the Third World 1815-1948 Under the international economic order which prevailed between the end of mercantilism and decolonisation (referred to in this essay as liberal imperialism) the costs of transacting, transporting and trading commodities, both within and across national and imperial frontiers declined sharply.1 To some discussable but un-measurable degree the opportunities to realize enhanced gains from trade also depended upon the political status of regional economies operating and interacting (through trade in commodities, capital flows, labour migration and the diffusion of useful knowledge) within a global economy – expanding along cycles of faster, slower and even negative rates of growth – but expanding, nevertheless, more rapidly than ever before. Contextualized within a key meta-narrative in global history concerned with imperialism the question addressed by this essay can be posed as follows: were the macro-economic benefits potentially available from the expansion and extension of international trade over the 19th and 20th centuries, less accessible to or more or less politically constrained for regional economies and populations of polities that continued or passed under colonial rule after 1815 than for societies that remained formally under indigenous and/or autonomous forms of governance?2 1 Foreman-Peck, J., A History of the World Economy (Hemel Hempstead, 1995) The relative weights and time trends for falls in transportation, transactions and information costs are discussed in Kuakiaren, Y., ‘Shrinking the World. Improvements in the Speed of Information Transmission’, European Review of Economic History 5 (2001) pp 1-29 2 The bibliography on imperialism in world history is now a library of books: an excellent recent text replete with references is Abernethy, B., The Dynamics of Global 1 In theory, multiple regression analysis - based upon a fully specified growth model and applied to an acceptable base of data for a satisfactory sample of regional economies for bench mark years between 1815 and 1948 - could conceivably isolate and even quantify the significance of forms of rule for the realization of gains from international trade during an age of liberal imperialism.3 Alas, and even if this contentious method produced plausible conjectures, the possibilities for completing cross-country, let alone cross- regional exercises in multiple regression analysis, are entirely remote for any of the years between the end of mercantilist warfare (1815) and the onset of decolonisation marked by Indian independence in 1948. Data are not there! Meanwhile tables 13 and 14 reveal that commodity exports per capita by region for 1900, 1937 and 1948 (the best index available to compare ‘scales of involvement’ in international trade for a large sample of colonized and autonomous economies display no clear correlations between types of governance and ‘potential’ gains from participation in foreign trade.4 Perhaps the only viable entrée into any reconfigured discussion of this important question will be to elaborate upon the macro economic context for achieving gains from trade, namely the growth and structural charges that occurred for the world economy as a whole as the context Dominance. European Empires 1415-1980 (New Haven, 2000) and Vide Johns, R., A Colonial Trade and International Exchange (London 1988) 3 An exemplar of the genre dominated by a family of models based on cross-sectional regression analysis is: Acemoglu, D., et al, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development’, American Economic Review 91 (2001) 1369-1401. For a sceptical review of the data used in these exercises, even for recent years, see Srinivasan, T.N., ‘Database for development analysis. An Overview’ and Rozanski, J., and Yeats, A., ‘On the inaccuracy of economic observations; in Journal of Development Economics 44 (1994) 3-27 and 103-30. For an excellent critique of the methods and assumptions of such exercises see: Kenny, C., and Williams, D., ‘What Do We Know About Economic Growth?’ in World Development 29 (2001) 1-22. 4 Maddison, A., The World Economy. A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001) p. 365 provides data for merchandize exports as percentages of gap in 1990 prices. His ratios are cited as a footnote to table 2. 2 for achieving gains from trade increased through time and conditioned prospects for economic growth across the geographical spaces and political boundaries of an evolving international economic order of colonized and autonomous regions of an integrating world economy. My essay will present data that reveals how ostensibly equal, or random, prospects for realizing potential gains from trade tended to be skewed in favour of particular zones of that evolving and integrating global economy. My suggestion, flowing from an analysis of bodies of data available for world trade, international capital flows and the migration of labour, is that: for long stretches of the past two centuries, prospects for trade (with potential for growth) for almost all regional economies of the present day Third World (colonized or formally autonomous) seems prima facie to have operated as a far weaker engine for growth than for regions of Western Europe and particularly for European settlements overseas. If this hypothesis can be clarified and supported with some acceptable statistics, then the representation of colonial rule (1815-1948) as any kind of widespread and significant constraint upon convergence derivable from participation in world trade ceases to be credible. Of course this thesis could become congenial for apologists for Europe’s imperial record over this period. They now maintain that European governance and institutions may well have helped numerous colonial economies and indigenous workforces to realize enhanced gains from trade before decolonisation. Nevertheless, the view developed here is rigorously agnostic on this contentious and ideologically charged issue because prima facie the data currently available suggests that the size of economies, their geographical endowments, natural advantages, distance from European markets, networks of internal transportation linking interior regions to seaports, and base-line ratios of exports and imports to gross domestic products, all mattered more than alien or indigenous rule for the 3 achievement of gains from foreign trade during an era of liberal imperialism.5 Furthermore, and in so far as participation in foreign trade was either a (or even the) major source for growth and structural change available to the agrarian economies of the Third World, the persistence of imperialism and extension of colonial rule over the 19th and 20th centuries on balance probably neither restrained nor promoted any marked degree of convergence in productivity levels and standards of living between today’s developed and underdeveloped countries. In opposition to a dominant view that argues for stronger ‘correlations’ between indigenous forms of governance and national economic progress, this essay will maintain that colonial rule at least over its final phase from 1815 to 1948 hardly altered prospects for long run growth across the spectrum of sovereign and non-sovereign regions of the world economy one way or the other. I have, moreover, argued elsewhere that this seems less true for Europe’s imperial states who ran their economies and societies into the awesome destruction of two world wars. For this era, colonizers made limited, if any, economic gains and their populations suffered massively from their prolonged geopolitical and atavistic commitments to the maintenance, extension and defence of empires.6 5 By using cross country multiple regression analysis, Gallup Sachs and Mellinger maintain that geography matters more than institutions in explanations for current differentials in real per capita incomes. Vide Gallup, J., et al ‘Geography and Economic Development’; Centre for International Development, Harvard University Working Paper 1 (1999) 1-41 and their report ‘Geography and Economic Development’ Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (Washington, 1998) 6 O’Brien, P.K., ‘The Security of the realm and the growth of the economy 1688-1914’ in Clarke, P., and Trebilcock, C., Understanding Decline, Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1997) 4 2. Liberal Imperialism But as a preface we must define liberal imperialism which refers to an international economic order of rules and conventions governing all forms of commerce across frontiers that came on stream over the 19th century and marked a departure from the previous violent and unstable system for the conduct of international economic relations. Under that ancien regime, ‘mercantilism’, the operation of international, inter-imperial and intra-imperial
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